EXCEPT FOR THE HEAT AND THE HUMIDITY, IT FELT ALMOST most like home. Hawks sat before the campfire and looked around in the gloom. The maintenance robots had done the real heavy work, but all of the crew had a hand in what was wrought here. Ironically, it was Cloud Dancer, Silent Woman, and the Chows who had the proper design skills; the others were far too civilized and spoiled to know just how to build this way out of the materials of the forest around them—supplemented, of course, by the transmuter. Even so, the rest had all been quite amused to discover that neither Clayben nor Nagy had ever seen a pit toilet until now.
The transmuter was a valuable device, but it had its limits. It could turn out real and useful things from programs sent by Star Eagle, but only if they were no more than a meter or so square and no more than two meters high. Even the maintenance robots had to be sent in pieces and partly reassembled by hand, and this was where Clayben was invaluable. It had been fascinating to watch a bunch of spindly wires and meaningless metal forms take shape to a point, be activated, and then assemble the rest of themselves without additional aid.
So now, in a cleared area just off the rocks and reasonably far from the water, they had several huts made from a bamboolike plant, with roofs of thatched strawlike growths from still other plants. The huts were quite comfortable and relatively waterproof. With outdated carpentry tools provided by Star Eagle’s apparently limitless data banks, basic furnishings had been built and a hand loom set up for Cloud Dancer and Silent Woman to weave blankets and other needed materials.
They still depended on the transmuter for most of their food; although the data banks of the generation ship contained the matrixes for a vast quantity of seed plants, it would take time and some care to cultivate such crops here, and there was no guarantee that what they planted would thrive in this planet’s climate and soil.
Clayben was setting up a power generating station in consultation with Star Eagle, but right now they had only basic power, all of which went to maintaining the defensive perimeter. This was a series of rods set well into the ground, between each of which ran a slightly visible and quite effective criss-cross of electric beams. Anyone or anything going between them would get a very nasty jolt; anyone touching one of the posts itself would probably die. The device also made a pretty nasty crackling sound when the current was interrupted, loud enough and strange enough to wake the dead. It was hardly foolproof—what could be under these conditions?—but it guaranteed that any attacker could not come in without warning.
So far, there had been nothing. No signs, no attempts at contact. Hawks was fairly pleased; everyone, even Sabatini, had pitched in to help build the place. Koll and Clayben coexisted peaceably, if uneasily. Hawks had the distinct feeling that while Koll was willing and able to go through with her end of the bargain, at least for the immediate future, Clayben clearly was scared to death, and Nagy wasn’t far behind him. The historian wished he knew or understood more about the strange woman. China was ever-present evidence of what Clayben was capable of doing in the name of playing god, but Hawks still couldn’t accept the story of Koll’s origins at face value. That was the problem. This was a mob bound together by mutual need and circumstance; it was no team.
Over in his own meager hut, Isaac Clayben sat, his potbelly overflowing his simple loincloth as he worked by the light of a primitive fiery torch on a portable lab bench that was incomprehensible to any of the others and powered by small energy cells that seemed eternal. He was as cognizant as anyone of the incongruity of his activities under the circumstances, but he was determined. Indeed, his thoughts were not much different from those of Hawks.
“A rabble, Arnold, that’s what we are. Primitive rabble at the mercy of an independent computer pilot. We will get nowhere this way.”
Arnold Nagy sighed. “Doc, I think we ought to let things settle themselves here, at least for a while. Raven and Warlock are my sort of people—we understand each other and I can deal with them. Hawks is a kind of father figure to them, but he’s no real leader type and he knows it. Other than them, only our China doll has real guts and brains, and she’s pretty helpless and dependent. Let things sort themselves out.”
“You forget the creature,” Clayben reminded him. “You’ve seen the way it—looks at me. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since we all came down here.”
Nagy shrugged. “What can we do about it? You’d have to incinerate or electrocute it to a puddle. Shooting wouldn’t work—you know that.”
“If only I had access to my database!”
Nagy sighed. “Doc, so you get the formula and you whip up a bath of the stabilizing shit. Ain’t no way she’s gonna jump into it and no way you can force it. Before you can deal with it, you gotta be in much better circumstances than here.” It was curious how Nagy, the linguist and dialectician, dropped naturally into a very common nasal and slang-ridden vernacular. The listener tended to forget the mind behind that common working-class voice—which was, of course, exactly his intention.
“The trouble is, Arnold, we’re going nowhere here. We’re lapsing into a primitive, quasi-tribal existence with no cohesion and no drive. With the resources we have on the ships and the knowledge these people represent I could make this into the nucleus of a team that could conquer the universe—but I dare not. Move against them and whatever slight compact the creature feels toward the group will dissolve.”
Sabatini had apparently been dozing on a cot, but now his eyes opened. “What did you say it would take to kill this whatever—it—is?”
“Incineration or massive electrocution.”
“Would the fence have enough power?”
“Possibly—if it could be kept on long enough. You couldn’t count on it, though.”
Sabatini was silent for a moment. “These torches—they’re oil fed, sort of, right?”
“Yes. It’s synthesized in the transmuter from palm fronds. Why?”
“How much could we get? Suppose the old bird could be lured, maybe forced, into touching one of them posts and then, while she was bein’ shocked, somebody poured this oil over her? Instant torch, right?”
Clayben stopped puttering and turned to stare at Sabatini. “You are becoming interesting. Go on.”
“I think it can be arranged. She’s been real protective of the girls, particularly the Chows and the Indians. The stream where we get the drinking water and the pit toilet are both real near the fence line, both in back, out of routine sight. I been itchin’ to teach them Chow bitches a lesson in humility.”
“Think you could?” Nagy asked, smirking a little. “Seems to me I heard tell the last time you thought that they shoved you out an air lock.”
“It was that China broad. I underestimated her, but you fixed her good, Doc. Them other girls ain’t no threat. China gave ’em their guts. I’m pretty sure I could lure Koll back usin’ one of them.”
Clayben stared at the former captain, the only one of them not out there of his own free will. “And then what, Captain? Assuming it works—then what?”
“Huh? Then we—you—take over, like you said.”
The scientist cleared his throat. “Yes, and I suppose you know how to do that as well. What? Slit Raven and Warlock’s throats? I doubt if that will be so easy, particularly the woman. She is a psychopath. She enjoys killing, and she is good at it, I suspect, or she wouldn’t be here. Hawks, too, of course.”
“Yeah, sure. Hell, if I can take out Koll, then you sure as hell can take out the others. Five women, three of us, should be real nice, with the China broad as hostage to makin’ that computer do what we want.”
Clayben glanced at Nagy, who rolled his eyes.
“As foreign a concept as this might be to you,” Clayben said carefully, “diplomacy and deal making often gain more than brute force, Captain. However, I’m willing to meet you partway. You take out the creature for me, and I will make certain you get all the reward I can muster. Take her out and leave the rest to us.”
Sabatini got up, yawned, and stretched. “Yeah, sure, Doc. Ain’t that what I said?”
The pit toilet, dug as far from the huts and the water supply as possible, was very near the camp perimeter. Since the fence line could be breached by a projectile weapon such as stone, spear, or arrow, anyone using the facilities was in a vulnerable position. So no one went to the toilet without an armed guard. Manka Warlock or Reba Koll generally accompanied the women, since only those two had any experience with modern weapons.
Sabatini had planned fairly well. He had only to sit, and wait, watching from a vantage point to one side of the huts, until he saw Chow Dai walk casually out toward the pit toilet. Reba Koll remained in the more protected hut area, where she could stand guard without becoming a target herself. She wasn’t even watching the girl, which allowed Sabatini to gather his small set of tools and make his way along the fence line unobserved. Chow Dai, finished, stood to adjust her ersatz skirt. Koll seemed preoccupied with something back toward the campfire area.
“You’d look better without that skirt,” Sabatini said aloud to Chow Dai. “I remember you real good, honey. You been a long time without a man to give you what you need.”
She started and looked at him in shock. Sabatini had cruelly tortured her and the others when they’d been helpless prisoners on his ship, and the memory of that remained.
“Get away, you bastard,” she snarled at him bravely, although her voice was trembling. “If I need a man I will find one. There are none near me at this moment, only foul-smelling excrement.”
“You little bitch! Do I have to teach you again?” He reached for her, deliberately, and with some melodramatic exaggeration.
She wriggled free and started to run, but he grabbed her arm and pulled her back to him. She screamed.
Koll’s head came around. For a brief second her hand went to the trigger on her pistol, but she didn’t dare shoot, since Sabatini had a wriggling, panicky girl in his grasp.
“Sabatini, you worm!” she shouted, running out toward them. “You let her go right now! This has gone far enough!”
He grinned evilly at Reba Koll. “You gonna stop me, you washed-up hag?” Coldly seeing that Koll had no intention of shooting, he flung Chow Dai away and stood to face the onrushing woman, who clearly was too angered to think straight or call for help. Chow Dai just lay on the ground, stunned.
“I’ve taken far bigger and better’n you!” Koll snarled, assuming a judolike stance. Sabatini grinned and did likewise. Koll feinted, then jumped, her feet aiming for his stomach, but he moved aside, and she struck a glancing blow that did not unbalance him. He managed to turn a full circle and push her farther out toward the fence. She recovered but Sabatini reached into the grass and pulled up a long, thin wire that seemed to run all the way to the fence. She saw it, laughed, and jumped it, only to find herself tangled in a whole nest of wires carefully concealed in the grass between the pit toilet and the fence. She fell over, and he was on her, grabbing her and pulling her right hand to the charged post. She struggled, but she was caught in the wire and briefly confused, and he touched her hand to the post.
There was a loud and nasty electrical buzzing sound that startled the insects and carried far in the wind. Chow Dai for a moment could not understand what had happened; if he had touched Koll to the fence, then why was he not getting the charge, as well?
His boots! she realized suddenly. He’s wearing his pressure suit’s boots! They protect him!
He let go and stepped back as Reba Koll’s scream of pain rose over the terrible sound of the fence’s lethal charge. He reached over and pulled away her pistol, suddenly afraid that the charge would make the bullets fire, then stepped well back again.
Reba Koll’s hand blackened, charred, and bubbled, and the stench of burning flesh suddenly filled the air. It seemed as if the hand were made of plastic, melting into a terrible bubble as Koll tried to pull away.
And Koll was pulling away, the right arm now connected to the bubbling mass that had been her hand by only some blackish, plasticlike goo, and then it was free—and she was free of the charge. Her hand was still on the post, still burning, but Reba Koll was no longer attached to it.
Sabatini frowned and stepped backward. “This ain’t possible!” he muttered to himself.
Reba Koll was obviously in pain, but she got to her feet, her blackened stump looking all the more horrible as she did so. There was no blood, and that horrified Sabatini most of all. He edged back still more, toward the bucket of oil he’d brought out with him and set down before accosting Chow Dai.
“Now you’ve gone and done it,” Reba Koll said in a dry, nasty voice that hardly seemed human. “Now you went and really made me mad! Who put you up to this? Clayben? Naw, he’s too damned smart to think something like this would work. Okay, sonny, it’s time now. Time for you and me to have a real intimate get-together.” And, with that, she advanced toward him.
There was just something about it all that completely unnerved Sabatini. He reached frantically for the bucket and tripped over his own wires, falling to the ground.
Most of the others, attracted by the loud noises and commotion, had drawn up in a semicircle, watching. Too late to help Koll, they were unsure of what to do.
Sabatini, still on his back on the ground, got hold of Koll’s pistol and brought it up. Seeing that, Warlock brought up her own pistol and took aim, but Clayben reached out and pushed it down. “No! She’s not the one in trouble! Watch and learn!”
The black woman paused and looked over at Raven, who took the half cigar from his mouth and nodded.
Sabatini fired three times into Koll’s body at point-blank range. The bullets tore into her, knocking her down and forcing her back, but even as the man was getting untangled and rising, so was Reba Koll. She stood there, three big holes in her chest, and though there were signs of bleeding, no blood was flowing now.
She laughed at him. “You’re mine now. You went and spoiled this old rag I had on.”
Manka Warlock stared along with the others. “Those were good shots,” she said in wonder. “It is not possible! See the gaping exit wounds in her back!”
Reba Koll ripped off her skirt and tore off her gunbelt with tremendous strength, and then leaped at Sabatini. This time the man could not move out of the way; he was as stunned and totally confused as Manka Warlock and the rest of them.
Koll clung tightly to Sabatini, and the man’s body suddenly stiffened. He opened his mouth in a cry of pain and surprise but nothing came out.
“Get away, Chow Dai! Get away now!” came a horrible, inhuman voice. The Chinese girl, suddenly animated, got up and ran to the others.
The two stood there a moment, a frozen tableau, the small, frail-looking old woman clutching the chest of the big, muscular Sabatini—and then it began to happen.
“Sweet Jesus!” Nagy swore. “They’re melting!” He’d been told about Koll—over and over by Clayben—but until now there always remained some lingering doubt over whether Koll was anything more than she seemed or merely the subject of a Clayben dementia. There was no doubt now in any of their minds that Isaac Clayben, sane or not, had not been kidding.
Raven’s cigar fell out of his mouth.
“Fortunately, it’s very slow,” Clayben remarked, his voice almost casual and clinical, as if discussing a sprained ankle. “That was the only reason we could capture and contain it at all. It’s been a long time since I saw this. I’m glad it’s no different. Gives me some odds.”
His detachment was disturbing to most of them, but they could not take their eyes off the slow-motion drama now taking place before them.
The merged bodies had become a single seething mass of amorphous flesh; it writhed and wrinkled like some great monster, and slowly, very slowly, a form began building out of the center, as if something inside the mass was now rising to and then through the top. At first it was a head, humanoid but hardly human, a death’s head with bloated, puffy flesh and no hair, eyes closed, lips and nostrils sealed. It was ugly and gruesome, but none could take his eyes off it even for a moment.
There was a neck now, then the torso started to emerge—a broad, muscular frame lacking in detail—then the waist, and finally thick, sturdy legs. Finally a complete figure stood in a thick pool of protoplasmic goo, but it was still not human, more like a thing of plastic or wax, an artificial man before the artisans had started to work. It was still being fed by the mass in which it was rooted like some strange tree, and it was still changing.
Subtly the skin texture and muscle tone changed, becoming flatter, harder, and more natural. The nipples, the fine detail of the male genitals, even, incredibly, a few minor scars on the torso were formed. Very slowly but steadily, so slowly that it couldn’t really be tracked by the eye—the way the position of the hour hand on a clock keeps changing even though its movement cannot be followed—the rest of the detailing came in, including the hair, the lashes, and the rest. The figure was clearly recognizable now as Sabatini.
Then, quite suddenly, an imperceptible new energy was added to the figure, and it was no longer a statue of Sabatini, but a real human figure.
It gave a shudder, then breathed deeply. Its lips parted, and it flexed its arms and knees and turned on its hips.
The eyes opened, and he looked down at the mass of goo with distaste and stepped from it, strands of plasticlike flesh trailing, then breaking away. He squatted down and removed parts of it that still clung to his feet; behind him, the mass that remained seemed now devoid of purpose. It writhed a moment, then was still, all life and energy draining from it. It began to putrefy almost instantly.
The new Sabatini got up and looked at them. “That’s the trouble with this if you’ve got conscience,” he said in Sabatini’s rich baritone. Even the accent was perfect. “One must either destroy those who are innocent and deserve life or one must make immortal the scum of the race. Don’t worry, Clayben—I’ll never eat you unless you force me to it. This is bad enough—to become you would be desecration.” He looked over at Hawks. “Now you see why I am essential to this thing. No matter what hell hole and no matter what monstrosity might have a ring, he is not safe from me. I can become his confidant, his lifelong friend, his lover. I can even become him.”
And me as well, thought Hawks glumly, knowing the others shared the same thought. Never had he thought so furiously and so logically to cover himself. “Can you become five or more of us at once, friend?”
The creature that was now Sabatini frowned. “What? Of course not. As you can see, the rest is rotting flesh.”
“Can you become a Val, then, or a robot? Can you become Star Eagle?”
“You know I cannot. Why are you pressing this way?”
“It will take five different people working in willing concert to use those rings, I warn you, and if any of the five objects are destroyed, it will be the destruction of them all. Even you could not withstand Master System in full defensive array and you know it. And you are only a bit less at risk than we. The Vals will be after you, as well. In a Val ship, in a machine environment, you will be as helpless as on Melchior and at the mercy of something far darker even than Clayben. Retain our partnership and you will share as I promised you would, but this is the last of our number that you will so consume.”
“I intend to keep our bargain and my word, although I can see why you would fear. How would you know if I violated it?”
“We’d all know,” Isaac Clayben said. “Because there wouldn’t be any Sabatini any more, would there?”
“I, personally, and most of the others, as committed and full of hate as we are for the system, would bring in the Vals if this compact is broken,” Hawks warned. “Your—ability—is incredible, beyond anything I would have believed only minutes ago. It is why you are here, included in this band.”
“I’ll behave,” Sabatini said, sounding quite natural and Sabatini-like. “You trusted Koll, didn’t you? She’s still here—somewhere. I confess even I am unsure how it works. The big problem I have is that I’m compelled to be a nearly exact duplicate. Even if you subjected me to full examinations, I would be Sabatini and Sabatini alone. You do not possess the equipment, nor the know-how to create it, to tell me apart. I have his urges, his temperment, and his habits. I simply have more self-control than he did, and more of a conscience. By tomorrow I’ll be Sabatini—a Sabatini who just changed sides, and knows more than he used to. I’m just not as stupid as he was.” He yawned. “I think I’ll get some sleep. It’s been a long time since I did this, and I’d forgotten how tiring it is.”
He walked off, and they let him go.
Raven crept close to Hawks. “Is that really true, Chief?” he whispered in Lakota. “About needing five willing ones?”
Hawks shrugged and replied in English. “Beats the hell out of me, Crow.”
Raven grinned. “Maybe you are the best man for this job, after all.”
It was quite late, but many were not asleep. Hawks sat by the fire, impassive as always, his mind in some plane all his own, while behind him, in the center hut, Cloud Dancer and Silent Woman prepared to aid China in the imminent delivery of her child. It was neither tradition nor paternalism that found those two in there and he and the others away; nobody but the two women in attendance had ever done that sort of thing before.
Isaac Clayben came over and sat down next to Hawks. For a while the Hyiakutt did not move nor in any way show that he was even aware of company, but suddenly he asked, “Is Sabatini still sleeping?”
“Yes. It is fully capable of being on the go within minutes after it consumes, but if it can it sleeps for a long time, which helps it integrate all the new memories and information into its mind. You heard it this afternoon—Sabatini never talked like that. It is an incredible process at that, so much integrated into a single mind. I sometimes amaze myself with my handiwork.”
“Did you create it—or order it created?”
“A bit of both. I did much of the theory, but others, more skilled than I, actually created it. The final single integrated program for it was the longest I had ever known. At computer speeds it took more than three days just to load that thing.”
“It seems inconceivable that human beings could have created such a thing.”
“Human beings created Master System. Just five of them, in fact, wrote all the code and debugged it and established it. Of course, it probably took an army of technicians to build even the initial primitive version and get it running right, but it was at its heart just five people. We don’t know a lot about them except that they were not even typical of the polyglot culture in which they worked. Only two were native to the nation that employed them, for example. A Chinese Buddhist from Singapore; a Jewish lady from Israel; a black Moslem man from someplace in Africa, I believe; a part-Japanese girl from Hawaii; and an old Jewish professor from someplace in eastern North America. Funny—we know their names, their origins, and, of all things, their religions, but little else.”
“I know. Much of it was suppressed. I suppose it was Master System’s own choice to keep some details of them alive in the records. After all, they were, in a sense, its parents and creators. The Fellowship of the Rings, they called themselves. I understand it was from some popular work of the time. A joke. One masking a serious purpose. They knew their creation could turn on us all, Doctor. You should have learned something from that.”
“I thought I had it all figured out. All contained. We were extra careful. We simply did not foresee how good an organism we had created. It is less an organism than a colony. Memory, control, you name it, is distributed in a unique and ever-changing pattern throughout the cells. You could blow Sabatini’s brains out and it would only slow it down. Sabatini’s memories and personality would be gone, but the rest—that’s stored and accessed differently. Unfortunately, what allows it to survive also makes it eventually unstable. Cells die or wear, new ones replace them. We hardly notice, but it does. Its cells have to do so much more than ours that it can’t replace them at our rate by normal means. You saw how it can do the job all at once.”
“I saw. It was a person once? A real human?”
“Yes. Frankly, I don’t even remember who. Someone from the penal area whom we took and cleaned with the mindprinter of all memory and all personality. A spiritual blank, as it were. It was the only merciful way to do it. After all, it—the mechanism—needed to know how we work, the quadrillions of intricate interrelationships we all possess. The original was a physical template, nothing more. A dedicated army of those could be anyone anywhere, walk through any security except the highest machine-only accesses, be invulnerable to most threats. Sent out as information collectors, they could get all the bits and pieces of knowledge we cannot and put it together. I had no knowledge of the rings. It seemed a fragile hope, but the only one, of breaking the system.”
“Why, Doctor?”
“Huh? Why what?”
“Why bother breaking the system? You and it seem so well made for each other, and I cannot see you as wanting to be god. Too much detail work. You were as free as any human can be in your own little playground. Certainly not on moral grounds, nor out of revenge. Why break the system?”
“Forbidden Knowledge. We were always on the edge of discovery, of being wiped out or worse. I have no idea why Master System ever tolerated Melchior. Even there, we had so many dead ends, and we were not free to pursue any leads we might develop. Humanity was born to quest for knowledge, Hawks. It is the only activity that really matters. The system places great limits on that, and I do not believe in limits.”
“That,” Hawks said dryly, “is obvious.”
“I could ask the same of you, you know. I think we are more alike than you want to admit. The system wasn’t exactly bad to you, either. You knew when you opened and read that pouch, even before you had actually divined a single word, that it would be dangerous, probably fatal. You just couldn’t resist it. Forbidden Knowledge.”
There was a sudden series of loud shrieks from behind them, then sudden silence, then the cry of a newborn baby. Neither man turned to the source of the sound, but both heard and understood.
“Just another digit in the mass of humanity to you, Doctor,” Hawks remarked. “Another subject, another plaything, nothing more. Not a new soul damned to strangulation, its future one of chains. That is the difference between us. That new one in there, who is getting such a rude awakening, is just as important, if not more important, to me than you are. You will not understand that. You will quantify it or dismiss it, but that is because there is a part of you that is missing. That is your curse, Doctor—the ultimate irony. Even without Master System there is Forbidden Knowledge for you; Forbidden Knowledge you can never have because you can never comprehend it. The quest is not the end, it is the means.”
“Spiritual claptrap. You are blinded by your romanticism and your mysticism, Hawks. You will never attain what you seek until you discard them.”
“The Fellowship did so, and gave us Master System. You did so, and now you cower in fear of your own creation. I do not wish to become Master System, Doctor. I do not wish a race of organic robots. That creature was your second creation, your second monster, Doctor—not your first. You are by far your most dangerous and aberrant creation.”
Cloud Dancer emerged from the hut behind them and approached the two men sitting by the fire. “It is a boy child,” she told them. “Healthy, looking well. The mother is also doing quite well physically, although her mind seems addled. It is almost as if she is drugged. I do not believe she even remembers her name or where she is, but she is suddenly all very soft and she smiles dreamily. She speaks gently and only of the act of giving birth. It is not the same woman.”
Isaac Clayben sighed. “This one isn’t really my fault, you know.” He sounded almost defensive. “Had I known that we’d all be stuck together like this in the immediate future I wouldn’t have meddled at all, but this would have eventually come about anyway. I helped things along, I admit, but she is her father’s creation.”
Hawks looked over at the scientist. “What do you mean?”
“The old man’s chief administrator for China, and brilliant in many ways, but he’s handicapped as much or more than most of us by the culture in which he was born and raised. He had the same sort of idea I did—to breed a superior race that might be able to run rings around Master System—but he was more conventional. He used his own daughter—his own daughter, mind you—for it. In fact, she wasn’t conceived in the usual way at all, but in a laboratory, from modified egg and sperm. She was designed to be superior, but there are lots of superior individuals about these days. He wanted more than that, and he’s a patient man. She was a prototype, too, of a possible large group of superior human beings—physically, mentally, you name it. Women who would breed his superior race. He wasn’t dumb, either—he knew that if she were not superior it was all for nothing, but if she was she’d hardly be content breeding future generations, so he planned to have her reverted to a nontechnological level so she wouldn’t know what she was missing and would accept her lot in a patriarchal system. The marriage arranged for her was actually a sham—the fellow’s a highly born noble all right, but he’s a total homosexual in a society that considers that grounds for death by torture. Being highly placed and well connected, he accepted the marriage and arrangement in much the same way others in his position have since time immemorial.”
Hawks nodded. “I see. And since she would bear many children, he would have honor and manhood even though they would be from specially modified laboratory sperm and not his at all. Under orders from husband and family, she would accept, like it or not.”
“Well, if she didn’t, he had the way to make her fall into it. Once impregnated, her entire brain and body chemistry changed permanently. Pregnancy is her natural condition; she is compelled to be so. Everyone—you, me, Cloud Dancer, Raven, you name it—have elements of both the male and female in us, biochemically speaking. All but China. During labor her body purged itself of all male-linked hormones and biochemical blockers. The only way to trigger aggression in her would be to threaten the child. She will react to maleness, even in the other women. She will be quite childlike, docile, eager to please, and without any control of her passions. She will quite literally do anything you want and beg to be ravished. Nothing else will matter—until she is pregnant once again. That will restore the balance and trigger normalcy of a sort in her system and she will be back in control, regaining her maleness, as it were. In fact, in the old man’s original genetic map, she would remain as she now is, which was what he wanted. I restored the chemical balance, allowing her, once pregnant, to regain her control and will. That way the experiment goes on, but without wasting that brilliant mind.”
“I think that is disgusting,” Cloud Dancer remarked. “She is but a girl yet—seventeen, eighteen perhaps. You are saying she will be compelled, if she lives that long, to bear children for the next twenty-five or thirty years nonstop, all the time knowing and remembering.”
“Worse than that. She’s physically perfect, as well. She’s going to remain youthful, healthy, and strong abnormally long, and free of most diseases that might ravage others. Assuming we aren’t all blown up or wiped out, she could be doing this for the next seventy or eighty years—a one-woman colonization program. The pilot understood this. I think she might, as well, although she’s repressed it to keep sane. And we need her sane. Next to me, she probably understands these machine intelligences better than anyone alive. Unfortunately, what looked simple to handle on Melchior now complicates us beyond belief. The longer she remains in this submissive and animalistic state, the harder it will be for her to deal with it when she is not. Her sanity depends on perpetual pregnancy, and that means we will soon be knee-deep in children, all of whom will require care and attention and possibly something approaching a staff. We can’t spare that staff—and we can’t spare her.”
“You seem to know a lot about her situation,” Hawks noted suspiciously.
“Well, of course, we had to read it all out to modify it or we would have lost that mind and will for good. We were aided because the old man quite naturally used Melchior’s resources in establishing his genetic criteria. I had no real part in it, but Melchior did it. We had the records.”
“So all the great minds of the world have spent their time devising monsters,” Hawks commented, “and they are all with us. Anything you want to tell me about yourself or any of the others here? At one time or another we were all common to Melchior.”
Clayben gave an odd half smile. “Nothing, really. Those of you who were prisoners rather than employees or staff were either too important or not important enough, I’m afraid. We were going to use your wives and the Chows as nursery matrons for the early products of the experiment, of course, and we did some minor mental conditioning to that effect, but nothing serious and nothing that might be an impairment. Nothing else that I know of.”
Hawks slapped his knee impatiently. “Damn it! We cannot just sit here and rot! The time to move is now, before things get too domesticated.” He sighed. “Yet we must wait for Star Eagle. I wish I knew just what he was planning that is taking so long.”
The crying stopped behind them, and there was a sudden stillness that seemed louder than the noises. Hawks looked at Cloud Dancer. “For now it’s Raven, Nagy, and I. We will draw lots when she is physically up to it. I do not like it, but these are exceptional circumstances.”
She nodded. “I understand. I do not think it would be moral or proper for him to be included.” She referred to Clayben, who said nothing.
“What about Sabatini, Doctor?” Hawks added, suddenly struck by the implications. “What would be the result of such a thing?”
“I’m not certain. There wouldn’t be sufficient information in a single sperm cell to do anything terrible. It won’t breed, if that’s what you’re thinking about. It’s probable that the union would be rejected, the product spontaneously aborted, but I don’t really know. I’d rather not have to deal with that one if we can avoid it.”
“Then it is up to us to make certain that is avoided. At any cost.”
“Star Eagle to Pirate’s Den.”
“Go ahead,” Hawks responded. “We thought we had been forgotten and abandoned.”
“Do you know what it is like to do massive maintenance without a proper shipyard? It was like performing surgery on yourself. Thunder is still not completed, but Lightning, I believe, is ready and well prepared. I wish to know the condition of all below.”
Hawks gave the computer pilot all the news in fairly explicit terms, particularly about China and Reba Koll.
“China is now all right?”
“Yes. She’s coming out of her physiological stage and will be back to normal in another week or two at most, but I don’t think it would be wise to part her from the child for any length of time as yet. Still, we’re hot, tired, and very bored down here. The whole thing is very limited.”
“I understand. I have not been idle myself, since my alterations are internal and are not affected by my movement. I have used the time to check out the situation. There is a world called Halinachi one jump and no more than six days from here that is a freebooter stronghold and base. I have no data except monitored transmissions on it, but it appears to be one of the officially tolerated outposts. There are at least two Vals in the vicinity and there is some indication that they go down to the settlement there.”
That was a surprise. “I thought the freebooters were more tolerated than actually part of the system.”
“They exist only because they are occasionally useful to Master System and otherwise do not get in its way. However, most freebooters hate the system as much as we—they just have no choice, as we did not. I had hoped that Koll would have contacts there.”
Hawks thought a moment. “Nagy, too, maybe. Let’s see.” He summoned both the security chief and the one now called Sabatini. “Halinachi. Either of you know it?”
“Both of us, I expect,” Nagy replied. He was getting a fairly good dark beard, and the sun had turned him almost as brown as Hawks was naturally. “I’ve been there. It’s one of a half-dozen contact worlds used by both sides when they want something from the other.”
“I can see much that they might wish from Master System, but what could they offer it?”
Sabatini spat. “Eyes and ears. Human bodies who can walk the other side where the best machines can’t get. The freebooters control the illicit trade between the colonial worlds—the stuff Master System won’t let get traded the usual ways. It’d take Master System too much time and effort to really stamp it out, so it just tries to limit it to things that won’t really upset the apple cart. Because of this, though, they’re able to have the confidence of some of the top administrators in the colonies. They hear things, and they listen. When they hear a bit of news that would interest Master System, they trade the secrets for something they want or need. You of all people should know that the system can be beat, to a point. To fill in the gaps, as it were, the machine uses the freebooters. It’s simple.”
“They sound like rather interesting excuses for human beings. The questions are simple, then. Would they turn any of us in to Master System for that sort of reward?”
“Probably,” Nagy responded. “At least we’d be in the file of people to sell out when the time was right.”
“Then how can you deal with them?”
Nagy sighed. “Look, you got to see it their way, too. They ain’t living in the lap of luxury, you know. No cradle-to-grave care for them, no instant spare parts, nothing. They’re high-tech barbarians, and they’re not even all human by our lights. Lots of ’em are colonials. They don’t live, most of ’em. They survive. Survive in a thousand little pockets scattered to hell and gone, like this one we got here. They like to think they’re outside the system—hell, I think they all believe they’re outside the system—but they’re really a part of it. They’d sell their own mother because they’re part of it. They really believe the system can’t be broken but only bent, just like all of us bent it. They’re true believers, just like we were.”
Hawks thought it over. “Suppose they thought there was a chance to break the system? What would they do?”
“Try to break it, most likely,” Sabatini replied. “Only not as a team, more like a mob. The ones who believed it would be shooting each other to get to the rings. The ones who didn’t would turn the ones who did in to Master System.”
“Can any of them be bought? Or rented?”
Sabatini chuckled. “We got nothing to buy them with, and even less to rent that the other side couldn’t outbid.”
Nagy scratched his chin in thought. “Hold it. Maybe we’re going at this wrong. The one thing they’re scared of is strength. That’s why Master System is the big cheese even when they kid themselves that it’s not. They have their masters and their warlords. Not all of ’em, sure, but a fair number. This Halinachi—it’s more a big town than a world. Most of the world’s not very habitable. Last time I was there it was run by a fellow name of Fernando Savaphoong. Get him interested in the rings and you got a real power there with a lot of resources.”
“Yeah, sure—and then he knocks us all off and goes after the rings himself,” Sabatini pointed out. “You can’t make a deal that’ll stick with his kind—except the kind that has him sticking something in your gut or back. Nope. If we need warm bodies the best thing to do is prowl and take some of the freebooters by force, and then run ’em through the mindprinter and whatever else we got to make ’em ours.”
First Warlock, then Raven, had noticed and approached the conversation, and both had been listening quietly.
“Suppose we eliminated this leader. Who would rule?” Warlock asked them.
“The next in line, mostly likely,” Sabatini replied. “Not the one who knocked him off, that’s for sure. If you could knock him off, and nobody’s invulnerable, he’s got a setup so the killer at least would go, too.”
“And if the next chieftain was eliminated, and the next?”
“Eventually they’d have your number, and somebody would be smart enough to spare no expense and effort to track us down and pay us back for the sake of sheer insurance. If you were good enough or powerful enough to prevent that, which I doubt, then you’d make the next in line scared enough to call in the Vals and all the resources of Master System.”
“They would not make a deal to avoid this?”
“Doubtful,” Nagy put in. “Or, if they did, then you’d have to expose yourself to them. They take the deal and. then they wipe you out, deal or no deal. We start messin’ with the freebooters in more than a casual way, and we got to decide just how many bodies we want piled up.”
“Ours or theirs?” Raven asked casually.
Hawks settled back and thought for a moment. This is what it is like to be chief, he told himself. How many bodies . . . ? For that matter, whose bodies? It was a good question, one he’d never really thought about until now. Could he order a massacre if he had to? Could he be as ruthless and heartless as the enemy in order to break him?
“What if this man believed that Master System had turned against him? Or could be turned against him?” he asked them. “What if he could be convinced that his petty little empire could not be held?”
They all looked at him. “You got something, Chief?” Raven asked.
“We need information,” he told them. “We need to know the organization, the structure there, everything. Lightning is ready and available. Could we get in and get this sort of information without drawing the dogs of the Master?”
“Maybe,” Nagy replied. “Not you, though, or anybody else with them tattoos on their cheeks. Ain’t nobody else with those particular designs roaming around, so there’s no way to hide who you are and where you came from. I haven’t been there in quite a while, and not too many people would recognize me on sight. Sabatini, here, is perfect—no marks and a total unknown there who still knows his way around thanks to his, uh, past lives, and I’m pretty sure we can do a halfway decent disguise on Raven and Warlock here, which would also gain us two more people with some deep-space experience. More would be obvious.”
Sabatini smiled grimly. “I could—become—this Fernando Savaphoong. That would vastly simplify matters.”
“Perhaps. For a while,” Hawks replied, “but only for a while. What happens when we need you to become someone else? What happens if your underlings cannot see the profit and will not go along? No, we’ll keep that in reserve, but not immediately.” He sighed. “I wish I could go along!”
“Get used to it, Chief,” Raven said, anticipating some action at last with obvious excitement. “You should know—chiefs don’t lead their men into battle, they stand on the high ground and direct it. You just watch it while we’re gone. I still don’t trust Clayben farther than I can throw him and I can’t even pick him up.”
The Hyiakutt historian suddenly started and snapped his fingers. “Of course!” he muttered to himself. “Of course!”
“You got something, Chief?” Raven asked him.
“This whole business has been percolating through my mind for weeks now. There’s been nothing much else to think about, anyway. Suddenly, just now, it all came together. We are few in numbers and relative power. Most of us cannot go into any civilized company without being known. Master System is required only to allow us the attempt, not the success, and it knows where we must go to get the rings, so it need only watch and wait there and we must come to it.”
“Yeah, so?” Nagy prompted.
“There is an old story, with many variations, of the professional master thief who wagers a fortune with a rich man that the rich man will be successfully robbed within a week. The rich man is robbed, in spite of all his precautions, yet when he comes to arrest the thief the suspect is found to have spent the whole evening with the chief of police.”
“I’ve heard that one,” Nagy responded. “He didn’t bet that he would rob the guy—he just bet the guy would be successfully robbed. That drew every thief in the world to the job since they figured they could take the rich man and the thief would take the fall. Go on. I’m beginning to see the way you’re thinking and I think I like it.”
“We are pirates, not secret agents. Suppose we did tell everyone, and I mean everyone, about the rings and what they did? Suppose we spread it throughout the entire freebooter camp? A hundred camps. They would go for it, would they not? After all, Master System will be looking for us to make the attempt. It knows where we must go—and so do we. We need only set the bait and wait for the experts to flock to it. Then we take the rings from those who succeed.”
“Tricky, but not as tricky as trying to heist them ourselves,” Arnold Nagy agreed. “We’ll need more ships, more intelligence. We’ll have to know the what and where. And we’ll have to be better than Master System.”
“That is what we start first. Communications. Intelligence. Ships. Training our own people and recruiting some specific personnel. There will be lots of details to work out before we can even start it all going.”
“It ain’t bad,” Raven commented, “but it needs work. What if we can’t track down all these thieves? What if they get away with the rings?”
“How many? One ring does no one any good, nor two, nor three, nor even four. We will use Chen’s logic against him. Even if someone were to amass all four they would have to go to Chen. These freebooters never went beyond Melchior by law and custom. They would not know. We can offer the fifth ring. We can also offer more—expertise on how they are to be used. In the end, remember, all five must be brought to Master System itself with quick death the penalty for any mistakes.”
“That’s all well and good, Chief, but we don’t have that expertise and you know it. We don’t know where Master System is any more than they do, let alone how to make it all work.”
“That may be true, but they do not have to know that. The very alarm put out by Master System will spotlight us as the experts, the ones who know. Consider: First the rings must be located, then stolen—the last no easy task in any case. Then the various organizations that have them must settle it between themselves until one has them all. Finally, they must bring them to us to know how to use them—to us or to Chen, if they learn of him. We will be conciliatory. We will deal. We will put it together.”
Hawks had left the communications channels open and now activated the communicator. “You hear all this, Star Eagle?”
“I do and I concur. First things first, though. We must know just what we face in the freebooter camp. I should be able to shadow and monitor them from a distance so long as there are no Vals or direct sensor stations within the system itself. We need information and we need contacts. As for ships—we will make the pirates of the Thunder a legend here.”
Raven smacked one fist into the other. “Hot damn! Let’s do it!”